Emerging biotechnologies: full report - Nuffield Council on Bioethics

E m e r g i n g b i o t e c h n o l o g i e s
document. The main places in which support for <strong>biotechnologies</strong> is decided are a small number
of pharmaceutical and industrial firms, research councils, medical charities and a large number of
dedicated biotechnology firms.
43. Strategic advice to government on the ‘big picture’ of biotechnology has declined with the winding
up of a number of high level bodies created at the beginning of the century, which has reduced
opportunities for broad debate and public access. At the same time government technology
policy, including in the life sciences, has become increasingly framed by the single dimension of
economic growth. While economic benefits are important, they are not solely important, and they
risk obscuring other important values, though these are more difficult to quantify. The economic
paradigm now dominates policy relevant to emerging <strong>biotechnologies</strong> in the UK, except the policy
of charitable funders who continue to have a substantial role. Areas such as synthetic biology
and personalised medicine become a focus for funding by virtue of estimates of the market value
that they promise to deliver. Such policies, however, lack relevant evidence in support, although
they conform to a number of assumptions that have become commonplace in research policy.
44. Reflections on research policy assume that states should fund research because it is a ‘public
good’ that would be underprovided by the market. However, the real reasons states fund
research are more complex, and include national security and economic growth. We find that
there is a case for publicly funded research to generate knowledge so that it can be made
available to all, independently of private interests, in order to defuse the dangers of
‘overpromising’ and ‘overclaiming’ that we have identified.
45. We investigate the assumption that ‘Britain is good at research but poor at commercialisation’.
We find that Britain is indeed good, but not exceptionally good, at research compared to its major
competitors; while on the other hand it has actually been reasonably successful in
commercialisation (although this success has declined in recent history). However, there is little
evidence to link the relatively strong underpinning research in UK institutions with successful
commercialisation by UK companies. Given the transnational organisation of research, and the
multinational organisation of the biotechnology industry, only a fraction of research and
development feeds into national growth. While there is certainly a need for better economic
evidence in this area, we recommend that the determination of biotechnology policy should
attend explicitly to diverse perspectives and bodies of evidence rather than privileging a
single, quantitative frame of evaluation (such as economic costs and benefits, or costs
and benefits reduced to economic values); this should feed in not only to government policy
but also to funding bodies and, indeed, to research institutions.
46. Another assumption in the policy literature is that biotechnology is central to social and economic
transformation and should be supported, drawing on an implicitly linear model of technical
change. However, such assumptions lack the support of reliable correlations between innovation
and social and economic outcomes, and fail to take into account the complexity of real-world
innovation systems. We find that the difficulties facing the pharmaceutical industry and lack of
returns on its investment in biotechnology over thirty years give grounds for greater caution. We
recommend that there is a need for serious evaluation and assessment of past research
policies, both of Government as a whole and of particular public funding bodies, to
understand in what conditions, if any, selective approaches to support for biotechnology
are plausible. We find that selective approaches in research policy are likely to be fruitful only in
very unusual conditions and, as a way of hedging against uncertainty, recommend that policy
makers should consider adopting an approach to social objectives that fosters diversity of
research approaches, not just within the particular domains of individual funding bodies
but across physical and life sciences, and the social sciences, combined with selective
conditions of innovation that involve social benefit rather than just market value.
47. We examine the assumption that detailed priorities in basic research are set by researchers
under a general strategic steer from government (loosely referred to as the ‘Haldane principle’)
and find that the issue of who controls UK research policy is far from clear, although business
and industry figures occupy prominent places in the key decision making bodies (advisory bodies
such as the Technology Strategy Board, and the research councils). We take note of initiatives to
include and even institutionalise broader societal perspectives in research strategy but find there
is a persistent asymmetry of influence. We therefore recommend that research policy should
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